Profile Theatre, kicked out of home in Southeast, announces plans to move in with Artists Rep downtown

Profile Theatre's current season, featuring such Athol Fugard plays as '"Master Harold and the Boys" (with, from left, Sam Benedict, Garfield Wedderburn and Bobby Bermea) will be its last in Southeast Portland's Theater! Theatre!Jamie Bosworth Photographer

Profile Theatre will go West next season, taking its operations from Southeast Portland to the downtown home of Artists Repertory Theatre. The move, announced Saturday evening, provides a surprisingly quick solution to at least part of the performance-space crisis that cropped up last month when the owner of the Theater! Theatre! building on Southeast Belmont Street decided to convert the two auditoriums there into office and warehouse space for a retail tea business.

In June, Profile will move its offices into space on the east end of Artists Rep’s building near I-405. Profile likely will present some readings in the fall, but its next season, focused on the plays of Sam Shepard, won’t start until January, shifting the company to a calendar-year schedule that artistic director Adriana Baer says she’d been contemplating even before losing the Theater! Theatre! lease.

“I think it will be really good for our audience,” Baer said of the move, which will provide an upgrade in stage space, seating and especially in lobby size and amenities. “I’m sad that we’re leaving Southeast. That’s one thing that’s bittersweet. But the advantages (to the new arrangement) are really good.”

According to Profile managing director Matthew Jones, rent at Artists Rep will be “closer to what we have been paying that to what we’d likely have had to pay if we’d been able to stay at Theater! Theatre!”

Baer says she approached Artists Rep managing director Sarah Horton just a few days after learning her current lease would not be renewed. And instead of using Artists Rep as a stopgap, the two companies have forged what they expect to be a long-term arrangement.

“What I was aiming for was a home,” Baer says. “I didn’t want a situation where we had our offices in one place, rehearsals in another and performances somewhere else. Artists Rep was the only place in town I could think of that would be able to provide all that. They have a lot of room in that building.”

Profile will become the second resident company housed at Artists Rep, following the lead of the smaller, newer Portland Shakespeare Project. The move also puts the theater scene’s two newest artistic directors -- Baer and Artists Rep’s newly hired Damaso Rodriguez -- under the same roof.

“There’s a lot of energy around that transition,” Baer says of Rodriguez succeeding longtime artistic director Allen Nause. “I don’t anticipate doing joint productions, but it’s an exciting time to be working with them.”

Rodriguez has prior experience with such arrangements. Furious Theatre, the Southern California company he co-founded in 2001, had an official residency with the long-established Pasadena Playhouse from 2004 to 2011. Midway through that tenure, the larger theater also made Rodriguez its associate artistic director.

The presence of Profile, a small but well-regarded company currently in its 16th season, should help make Artists Rep even more of a focus of attention during Rodriguez first season at the helm.

“It’s a great opportunity for us to help a company in need,” says Artists Rep marketing director Nicole Lane. “We’re looking to create a sense of vibrancy here, with our two theaters and our two lobbies. It was pretty much a case of mutual excitement at the prospects.”